A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (37 page)

“Yeah. Who's this?”

“Jason.”

“Jason who?”

“Your brother,” I said. “In Seattle.”

We'd started referring to each other as siblings right before she left for Hawaii. It explained to us, and to everyone else, why two people who got along so badly were also so important to each other.

“Jason?” she asked. “What's—oh, fuck. Did Mark fucking die? Shit, Jason, I'm sorry—”

“No,” I said. “He's not dead. I wish.”

“You guys had a fight or something? You know it costs, like, twenty-five cents a minute to call from the mainland, right?”

“Cal, he said he was going to lock me up.”

“What?”

“He said he's going to lock me up. He's gonna have me committed. Like, to a mental institution.”

“Oh!” she said, getting it. Then, “Oh … really? He said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Boy. Pot, kettle, huh?”

“What am I gonna do, Cal? I can't—if he does that, I don't know. I don't know what I'll do. I can't go into a place like that. I can't!”

“Calm down,” she said. “He's not going to commit you to a mental institution.”

“He said he was! Just now!”

“Look, your dad can't scratch his ass without making a big production out of it. If he actually gets around to doing it, he'll tell you exactly what he's going to do before he makes the first phone call. You'll have plenty of warning.”

“So?”

“So just leave. If it comes to that. Just leave. Go someplace else. Go to New York. Screw it, go to Canada. Come here. I don't know. Just leave. Living on the streets is fucked, but if the alternative is letting your dad give you the Frances Farmer treatment, to hell with it. Eventually you turn eighteen, and after that he can never mess with you again. This isn't the rest of your life. It's three years, at most. Assuming he lives that long, which he probably won't. You just have to gut it out.”

“That's good,” I said after a pause. “That's a good point.”

“Sure it is,” she said.

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me what?”

“How are you and Olive getting along?”

“Great, right now. She's on the big island for a few months, in a shack in the jungle, guarding a pot farm.”

I laughed.

“Our parents suck,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Cal … what if he's right? What if there's something wrong with me?”

“There's no ‘if,' dude. There's something wrong with you.”

“I'm serious,” I said.

“So am I. Look, the shit we've been through, there's something wrong with both of us, and there probably always will be. We're never gonna be happy people. We're never gonna be like everyone else.”

“Is that a good thing? Sometimes I think I see life more clearly than they do.”

“I think we probably do see life more clearly than they do, but I'm not sure it's a good thing. It's like having a magic power. You can hear things nobody else can hear. But the special frequency that you're tuned into is the screaming and suffering that everyone else ignores. What's so great about that? You get a free cable channel nobody else gets, but all they show is snuff films.”

“You're totally cheering me up,” I said.

“Hey, you called me.”

“Yeah,” I said. I'd stopped crying. My heart had stopped racing.

“You think he's right? About me being messed up? Hurting animals and whatever? Thunder. The cat in Ballard.”

“No,” she said. “I was there for the thing with Thunder, remember? You were being eight. That's all. You never shot birds with your BB gun, or any of that shit. You never went off and hurt animals in private. You told your dad about the cat, for God's sake. Still a complete mystery to me, that. You couldn't even punch a bully at school. You don't have that in you. It doesn't mean he can't use it to fuck you up, but as far as it being true—don't even think it.”

We were quiet on the phone for a while.

“I'll be so glad when he's dead,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

I rubbed my free hand across my face.

“Thanks,” I said. “I feel better now. But, like you said. Twenty-five cents a minute.”

“All right,” she said, turning on a dime. “Later.”

“Later.”

I hung up.

Cathy showed up about twenty minutes later, apologizing profusely. It had taken her longer than she thought it would to get her stuff packed up. Dad let her in and showed her the birds. I peeked out into the hallway and saw a pretty blond woman in her mid-twenties. She was wearing a white button-down shirt and a pair of jeans.

“Jason, this is Cathy,” Dad said. She turned to look at me. She had a nice, open face. Glasses. Friendly eyes. She reached out to shake hands, and her palms were cool and soft.

“Hi, Jason,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, staring at her chest just long enough to be embarrassed about it later.

Dad left without saying goodbye. I didn't come out of my room again. When I went to sleep that night I could hear Cathy and someone else moving boxes into the living room.

*   *   *

Dad and Bruce went to Mexico the next morning. I lived with Cathy for three weeks. She wasn't home much, but when she was we read through her collection of vintage
Time
magazines, and talked about how women used to dress in advertisements, and what messages the advertisers were trying to send about their products. She told me why she loved theater. She told me about how she'd lived in Paris once. She asked me what my high school was like, and if gangs were really a thing in Seattle. She tactfully ignored the crush I obviously had on her, and she was kind and funny and fun to talk to. For three weeks, I went home after school, and I slept well at night.

 

59

Dad and Bruce broke up when they got back from Mexico, pretty much just like I knew they would. I'd never gotten along with Bruce, and in the alternate universe where my dad wasn't dying, I would have been happy to be rid of the annoying boyfriend so Dad and I could get our groove back. Unfortunately, in the universe I actually lived in, losing Bruce meant taking care of Dad myself, and I wasn't up for it. I wasn't up for it because I was still a kid, and I could barely take care of myself. And I wasn't up for it because the idea of my dad dying bothered me less every day.

*   *   *

Dad kept wanting to have little talks with me when he was high. It took me a while to figure out that was what was happening. I'd spent so much of my life around people who were living in one kind of altered state or another that even the most deeply aberrant behavior barely registered with me, or if I did notice it I thought it was just an exceptionally heavy mood swing. Dad had spent about half my life up to that point stoned on pot, or in withdrawals from pot, or high on MDA or mushrooms or the chemical of the week, so it was especially difficult for me to pick out when he was on drugs because I didn't have a baseline of normalcy to compare it to. Since he'd gotten sick he'd been taking handfuls of painkillers like Valium, Demerol, codeine, and Seconal. Anyone else would have been unconscious or dead, but Dad just got weirdly flat. And then sometimes he'd say things like “Hey, Jason, come in here and talk to me for a sec. We don't talk enough anymore.”

So I'd stop, on my way in or out of my room, and cross the hall and sit awkwardly on the end of his bed. He'd lie there under his Pendleton blanket, joint in one hand, smiling at me, and looking at me through lidded eyes.

“How's school?” he'd ask.

“Fine,” I'd say.

“You meeting any girls?” he'd ask.

And I'd shrug. I was still missing one of my front teeth, my clothes were all trashed, and I didn't have any friends. So really, what was the point?

And then the conversation would go somewhere else.

Once it started with him saying, “I tried with your mother, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“She's just—you know how she is. She just makes you nuts. She could push Gandhi into punching her in the mouth. I'd come home from work, you'd be sitting on the floor screaming, with a diaper full of shit, there'd be a sink full of dirty dishes, she'd be pulling her hair out and crying. We just fought all the time.”

“Sure,” I said again. Most of my life, my dad had been telling me that he and my mom had broken up because he couldn't stand what a slob she was. So this lined up with the story I'd always heard.

“We used to fight,” he said. “We'd fight all the time.”

I remembered them in the Hayes Street house, before Mom moved to San Francisco; the two of them, standing at either end of the dining room table, screaming at each other. I remembered them screaming at each other on the phone. In the park. Once at a doctor's office.

“Like one time,” Dad said, “we were just going at it. Seemed like for hours. The fight went out in the hall. We were living in this apartment building. Nice older place in downtown Eugene. We'd been fighting for hours, and I decided to leave. She followed me out into the hall and I totally lost it. There was this big wide stairway down to the lobby of the building. I just grabbed her and threw her down the stairs.”

I looked up. I'd never heard this part of the story before.

“You threw her down the stairs?” I asked. “Like, actually—threw her? Down the stairs?”

“Well, yeah,” Dad said, pausing to take a hit off his joint. “I was trying to kill her. I threw her down this long flight of wide stairs, and she just screamed and cursed all the way down. Didn't shut up. So I went down, grabbed her by the hair, dragged her back to the top of the stairs and threw her down again.”

I blinked.

“Didn't kill her that time either,” he said regretfully. “Never could shut that bitch up. Hit her. Threatened her. Tried to strangle her once. Never could shut her up.”

He gave me a pleasant, stoned smile.

“Hey,” he said. “How's school? You meeting any girls? I didn't date much in high school. I took a girl to prom. Japanese girl. Mom flipped out. But she was just a friend. The Japanese girl. After a while people started saying I was queer, so my buddies set me up with this girl. Laurie Gannett. She'd had a crush on me for years. Got me high and we had sex. She said later I got her pregnant. I was leaving town anyway by then. I gave her two hundred dollars and told her to take care of it. I think she probably did. I never heard anything about her having a baby. But I guess you never know. You should check that out later. Maybe you've got a brother or a sister or something.”

Sometimes I used these retrospectives to ask any pressing questions I'd had floating around in the back of my mind.

“Hey, Dad, how did you actually get out of jail? I was never clear on that.”

“Marianne and some other people got money together for bail,” he said.

Again, this was what I'd always been told: Dad's friends bailed him out. That was how he got out of jail. It was only when I was older, into high school, that I realized bail was a pretrial thing. It didn't explain how he'd gotten probation instead of doing hard time. Oregon was notoriously hard on drug offenders in the seventies. Dad stared out the window, thinking.

“Then,” he said, “while I was out on bail, I was staying in this hotel, and I … sort of tried to kill myself. I got in the bath and I cut my wrists. But I chickened out. I called an ambulance. There was a psychological evaluation. The shrink told the judge I was … something. Maybe paranoid schizophrenic? Anyway, the doctor said there was no way I could do the time. I'd crack up in jail. So the judge gave me probation. Barely left a scar.”

He held up his arm for me to look at his left wrist. And, sure enough, he had two hair-thin lines of scar tissue across the base of his wrist. I couldn't believe I'd never noticed them before. Then I realized he usually wore a watch on that wrist.

“That reminds me of this time,” he said. “Before I was with your mom. I was living in Venice Beach, with these two guys. Boyd and Aaron. We were dealing out of our apartment and the cops were onto us, but we only dealt with people we knew, so they couldn't get probable cause for a warrant. To get around it they sent two narcs—not cops, but confidential informants—around to pick a fight with us. They just knocked on the door, shoved their way in, started beating the shit out of us. One of them almost bit my ear off. The other one was beating on Boyd. Aaron came out of the kitchen and stabbed the one that was beating on Boyd with a kitchen knife. It went all the way through him. Through his back, came out of his chest. The other guy ran off. I hid the drugs in a vacant lot next door. The cops were furious. They took me to a hospital to get my ear fixed and the doctor let me sneak out the back door.”

“Okay,” I said. “I've got to go. I need some fresh air.”

“Hey, Jason. Come here and talk to me for a sec. We never talk anymore.”

“I can't, Dad. I have to be somewhere else.”

*   *   *

I finally got rid of Dad's birds. Some of them went to friends, and some of them went to pet stores, but all of them went and I didn't bury any of them in the garden. Thunder had been spending more and more time down in Kris's apartment. I didn't mind. I'd never liked him much, and the fewer things I had to take care of besides myself, the happier I was.

 

60

Sometime during my tenth grade year, I told Brandon my dad was gay. I got Dad's permission first, but I had to argue my case. Dad didn't think it was anyone else's business. I basically agreed, but the traditional lie—telling people Bruce was my uncle—wasn't going to fly anymore.

“Dad, Brandon lives in the same neighborhood we do. He sees gay guys all day every day. If he had a problem with it, I'd expect to have heard him say something by now. And one way or the other, he's going to figure it out. Better I tell him, don't you think?”